MRS HEMINGWAY a Novel

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository MRS HEMINGWAY A novel What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the Work of Ernest Hemingway Critical thesis Naomi Wood A thesis submitted to the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. October 2013 The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress Washington DC. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that the use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation of extract must include full attribution. 1 Abstract Mrs Hemingway and ‘What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the Work of Ernest Hemingway’ Naomi Wood 2013 This thesis in Creative and Critical Writing comprises two parts. The novel, Mrs Hemingway, is an exploration of the lives of the Hemingway wives: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Set in the last weeks of each marriage, from bohemian Antibes to pre-war Key West, Liberation Paris to Cold War Idaho, each quarter is told from the point of view of the next Mrs Hemingway. The novel aims to bring to the fore the female voices that have been lost, or at least sidelined, by the hyper-masculinised narrative of the writer’s life. It also seeks to disrupt the homogenous reading of Hemingway’s first marriage as the only one of lasting importance: a view begun in the author’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) and continued in many biographies since. One of the aims of Mrs Hemingway is to draw attention to the other three wives who defied canonisation, and to suggest Hemingway’s feelings for the ‘other Hemingway women’ were very much more moveable than has been previously suggested. The second part is a critical thesis on the subject of loss in Hemingway’s texts. During my creative work, loss became the major governing theme of my novel: the author lost wives, lost words in lost manuscripts, and finally lost his way with words in the 1950s. This thesis investigates the same theme in a critical idiom: how Hemingway’s characters endure loss, and how it is the major – and rather under- critiqued – subject of Hemingway’s texts. The essay also argues that while the author’s fascination with loss spans his whole career, the style and strategy of loss changes in the mid-1930s. 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my family and friends for their unending support, patience and love; particularly Pamela, Michael and Katherine Wood. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professors Giles Foden and Rebecca Stott for their help over the past few years: helping fix problems I could no longer see, as well as finding a path around the ones that seemed insurmountable. Enormous thanks to you both. I would also like to thank my agent Cathryn Summerhayes at WME, who has provided constant encouragement, support, help and guidance over the years we have worked together. I would also like to thank my editor at Picador, Francesca Main, for her wisdom, kindness and time. I am enormously grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous provision of a financial award, without which it would not have been possible to dedicate these few years to reading, writing, and travelling to the archives. My thanks once again to Giles Foden for helping me to secure both the AHRC grant and the Kluge funding to get to the Library of Congress. I have been greatly assisted by the staff of libraries, archives and heritage homes. My thanks go to Carole Holden and Matthew Shaw at the British Library who have helped immeasurably in my hunt for all things Hemingway. Mary Lou Reker and Caroline Brown at the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress were of unfailing support to me during my research trip to Washington DC; as were the staff at the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Thanks are also due to the staff at Cambridge University Library. My thanks also to the incredibly helpful staff at Hemingway’s homes in Oak Park, Chicago; Key West, Florida; and in San Francisco de Paola, Cuba. 3 Table of Contents Title Page………………………………………………………………………… 1 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………... 2 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………... 3 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………….... 4 Part I: Critical Study What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the work of Ernest Hemingway 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………. 6 2. Loss: A Private Concordance…………………………………………….. 12 3. Loss and the Lost Generation…………………………………………...... 20 4. Never Mind: Loss in The Sun Also Rises…………………………………… 24 5. ‘A Moment’s Arrest’: Mourning Loss in A Farewell to Arms……………….. 34 6. The 1930s: The Story of a Style………………………………………….. 43 7. ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: Harry’s Howl of Loss……………………… 48 8. The Old Man and the Sea: A Three-Act Loss……………………………….. 54 9. Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 60 Part II: Novel Mrs Hemingway Hadley……………………………………………………………………… 65 Fife………………………………………………………………………….. 112 Martha……………………………………………………………………… 157 Mary………………………………………………………………………... 201 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………… 244 4 Part I What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the Work of Ernest Hemingway 5 1. Introduction The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’, (1977). 1 To lose, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is to be ‘deprived of or part with’ an object, person or thing.2 Throughout his career, Ernest Hemingway parted with many of his manuscripts entirely by bad luck or accident. His wife lost his first novel and all but two of his short stories in 1922; he lost notebooks to the Ritz Hotel in 1927 (he reclaimed them thirty years later); and he forgot about manuscripts left in Sloppy Joe’s storeroom in 1939. All of these instances were accidental, but Hemingway also parted with substantial portions of his manuscripts on purpose. Indeed, the loss of words became the animating idea behind the composition of much of his early fiction. Hemingway developed a craft in which he lost portions of manuscripts not to ‘deprive’ his texts but to strengthen them. The intentionality of losing became something of an ‘art’: ‘the art of losing’, Elizabeth Bishop suggests in her poem ‘One Art’, is something that can be mastered, and once mastered it can be done ‘farther’ and ‘faster’. Writing in 1933, Hemingway reflected on a decade’s experience of mastering the ‘art of losing’, using the image of an iceberg to illustrate how his fiction works on the exploitation of what has been lost: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.3 1 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems, (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 178. 2 Oxford English Dictionary, def. 4f. 3 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Penguin, 1933), 182. 6 The visible story – its structure, objects and actions – is what can be read on the page: the published story is the iceberg’s cap. The story excluded is the iceberg’s tail. The ‘feeling of those things’ lost would subtly inflect the mood of the final story.4 While Hemingway used the metaphor of the iceberg in 1933, many writers since have used the image of knife-work to describe Hemingway’s early working method. This metaphor might be preferable to the iceberg because it captures more accurately the dynamism – and some of the violence – of what made the final cut. Biographer Carlos Baker described Hemingway’s technique as ‘scalpel-work’ with which he ‘attacked’ his manuscripts.5 Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that Hemingway ‘whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick’ in his poem ‘Years of the Dog’. 6 Elsewhere, Hemingway himself argued that his work should be judged on ‘the excellence of stuff cut out’.7 Whether it is ‘scalpel-work’, ‘whittled’ or ‘cut out’, the knife-work metaphor suggests once again that the text is rendered from what has been sliced away. Hemingway’s Early Style This methodology of reduction was one of Hemingway’s favoured means in his journey to find the best forms for his texts. According to the author’s memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964), this process of omission was first used in the short story ‘Out of Season’ (1923), where Peduzzi’s suicide is omitted so that the reader is left to ‘feel’ the tragic end of the story without explicit illustration. This method – what critic Susan Beegel has called Hemingway’s ‘craft of omission’8 – was then developed in many short stories afterward: the author omitted any mention of the war from ‘Big Two- Hearted River’ (1924), and he ‘left everything out’ of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ 4 Hemingway’s famous iceberg image may not actually have been his own. Peter Griffin suggests the metaphor was lifted from a letter written by his first wife, Hadley. See Peter Griffin, Along with Youth : Hemingway, the Early Years, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 5 Ernest Hemingway, Three Novels of Ernest Hemingway.

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